https://www.mdu.se/

Government agencies struggle to address wicked problems because they are open-ended, highly interdependent issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. While both quantitative modelling and qualitative problem structuring methodologies have been used to support interagency decision making in the past, co-designing an effective interagency organization to collaboratively tackle wicked problems is more challenging. Few approaches have been developed to enable such efforts. This paper explains how the viable system model (VSM) was implemented through a board game, which was employed to co-design an interagency meta-organization that would be capable of more effectively collaborating to jointly address a wicked problem: international organized drug crime and its interface with local gangs in Chicago, USA. The board game was developed to make the VSM easier for the participants to learn, given that the cybernetic language and engineering-influenced diagrams in the original literature can be off-putting to leaders and managers. The board game was used as the final stage of a multi-method, systemic approach, which involved boundary critique and problem structuring as well as deployment of the VSM. The research findings indicate that the VSM board game, used as part of a larger mixed-methods systemic intervention, contributes to building trust in the value of systems thinking amongst the participants, and sets up a rich context for collaboration on multi-agency co-design. The game therefore offers significant promise as part of the co-design of interagency responses to wicked problems because it creates an embodied process for stakeholders to learn about the VSM. It also reduces the work involved in this learning. Thus, the game enables an effective appropriation of the VSM language and criteria.

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first summarises the up-to-date knowledge and provides an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion and used as a point of reference by a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes.

In this paper, we propose a research agenda to support the recovery of Alexander Bogdanov's philosophical and systemic thinking that culminated in his magnum opus, Tektology. Our main reason for doing so is to re-address enduring questions about the unity of science and the unity of the systems paradigm. Since the turn of the new millennium, there has been renewed interest in the ideal of the unity of science. General system theory (GST), cybernetics and complexity science are three significant intellectual sources inspiring this renewal. It is not unusual for these ideas to be grouped under the umbrella terms systems science or systems thinking, which are two ways to present a single systems paradigm, and we will explain why its "unity" is both necessary and problematic. Bringing Bogdanov's work back to address the unity question can help us to progress toward unity in diversity.

Adaptation to climate change is impacted by a range of interrelated processes operating from local to global levels. There are often significant disconnects between different people's perceptions of responsibilities, capabilities and motivations, and divergent understandings of how the system works across actors, sectors and levels of governance. This results in misalignments of policies and practices, plus ineffective flows of resources and knowledge across the network of climate adaptation actors. As these disconnects are rooted in deep misunderstandings of the grounded realities of different actors, an experiential process of mutual discovery is required to build shared understanding and mutual respect. While it is common in the literature for people to talk about multi-level governance, most existing planning processes involve the production of separate plans at each individual level, based on the often-mistaken assumption that they will aggregate into an effective multi-level approach. This paper presents a new, multi-level integrated planning and implementation (MIPI) process, bringing together diverse actors from community, district, regional and national levels in the same workshop. The MIPI process creates a safe space that allows participants to interact directly in conducting systemic, cross-level analyses, as well as the multi-level integration of policies, plans and programs. The paper describes how the MIPI process was designed and facilitated in Ghana to address climate change, agricultural development and food security. This methodology has potential for much broader applicability to complex, multi-level planning and implementation processes.

This paper presents a systemic intervention methodology that starts with boundary critique: exploring different boundaries and values that might matter to stakeholders when framing the purposes of an intervention. Boundary critique helps people develop an enhanced understanding of the situation being addressed, and it focuses attention on dealing with conflict and marginalization. Systemic intervention also offers a theory and practice of methodological pluralism: creatively mixing methods from a diverse range of methodological sources in response to the initial boundary critique, so systemic improvements can be designed. This creative mixing of methods yields a much more flexible and responsive approach than might be possible with a narrower range of methods. The value of a systemic intervention approach is illustrated through several practical examples. 

Applied systems thinking has evolved since the 1950s through three paradigmatic waves. Authors in the first wave regarded systems as real-world entities, and systems models as representations of reality, so objectivity was important. In contrast, second wave authors emphasized thinking in terms of systems, and the exploration of multiple perspectives. The role of models was to aid mutual understanding and enhance the appreciation of diverse viewpoints on possible actions to be taken. In the 1980s, first and second wave advocates came into conflict. Then some third wave authors, initially working under the banner of critical systems thinking, argued that the division of the systems research community into two camps was unhelpful, and they advocated methodological pluralism – mixing methods from both traditions. Other authors set out to address power relations during interventions – in particular, the practice of exploring value and boundary judgments in projects in order to address conflict and marginalization. This practice came to be called “boundary critique,” and it was eventually integrated with methodological pluralism in a new approach called “systemic intervention.” This chapter gives readers a thorough overview of the emergence and maturation of both critical systems thinking and systemic intervention, illustrated with practical examples. It then discusses two major problems that remain unaddressed in the third wave. First, the increasing proliferation of methodologies and methods has resulted in such a diversity of views on systems thinking, that explaining what it is to newcomers has become a real challenge. Second, despite this diversity, all the new methodologies and methods are still founded on principles of rational analysis, and approaches that go beyond this are marginalized. For instance, arts-based and theater methods are rarely mentioned in the literature on systems thinking, yet they can help people discover how their value and boundary assumptions have roots in unconscious impulses and memories. Such discoveries help to unfreeze taken-for-granted understandings, including the internalization of oppressive power relationships. Very recent writings have begun to tackle these problems, but it is too soon to judge whether they represent an extension of the third wave, or the first swellings of a new, fourth wave of systems thinking. 

Wicked problems are open-ended, highly interdependent issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. In response, there has been advocacy for interagency working. However, this confounds conventional approaches to government because policies and budgets tend to be aligned within organizational boundaries and not across them, making it difficult to bring the appropriate talent, knowledge and assets into an interagency approach to tackle the interdependencies of whatever wicked problem is at hand. In addition, the purposes, perspectives and values of the various government agencies and other stakeholders can often be in conflict. This paper reports on research to develop and evaluate a systemic intervention approach involving the use of multiple methods underpinned by boundary critique to address a wicked problem. The major focus is how to create a common understanding of a wicked problem among multiple agencies using a participatory problem structuring method called & lsquo;systemic perspective mapping & rsquo;. The wicked problem we tackled was international organized drug crime and its intersection with local urban gang activity (using Chicago, USA, as a representative city). Perspectives on the problem were structured with participation from various local, regional and federal agencies involved in countering illegal drug trafficking. Our research found that the combined use of boundary critique and systemic perspective mapping was able to generate enough of a common understanding to provide a foundation for the design of an interagency organization using the viable system model (the latter is reported elsewhere in the literature). (c) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.